Today, enterprises and entities alike recognize the tremendous cost savings by exchanging electronic documents such as purchase orders, invoices, etc. with their trading partners via an electronic communication method referred to as the Electronic Data Interchange (EDI). However, diverse trading partner capabilities and their disparate and complicated systems present technical, strategy, and/or operational challenges to those considering using EDI.
Provisioning can be representative of one such challenge. In general, provisioning refers to the act or process of supplying or providing something, or making something available. The term “provisioning” can be used in a variety of contexts in today's technological environment. For example, in the telecommunication industry, the concept of network provisioning may refer to mediating a customer's services with respect to telecommunication network elements. In enterprise computing, provisioning may refer to the enterprise-wide configuration, deployment, and management of multiple types of enterprise system resources for enterprise customers. Regardless of these technological contexts, provisioning can generally be thought of as a combination of complex tasks performed by technical and non-technical humans (e.g., account representatives, information technology (IT) professionals, etc.) using various tools in an enterprise computing environment to set up accounts for users such that the users can, based on their individual unique user identity, access data repositories or are granted authorization to utilize the enterprise's software and hardware resources such as systems, applications, and databases in a controlled manner that ensures the security of the enterprise's resources. From the perspective of a customer of the enterprise (e.g., an operator of an EDI platform), provisioning can be thought of as a form of customer service.
Since it is in the enterprise's best interest to protect its resources from unauthorized accesses, customers of the enterprise in general do not have access to the enterprise's resources until they are properly provisioned. Unfortunately, because of the complexity involved, provisioning for a new customer can be a long and tedious manual process. At times, the length of time it takes an enterprise to provision a new customer may lead to poor customer satisfaction. Further, customers of the enterprise in general have no control as to how, when, and/or for whom an enterprise's provisioning may be performed.